Tag | ALM Posts

I stumbled on an article here, and could help but to agree more on the same. The thought is just awesome and almost echoes what i was thinking for long but i was always in loss of words. Initially, I shunned the very thought of managing people and getting more into managing timelines, schedule and execution of the project. I looked for the role if Individual Contributor (IC) and quickly discovered that the role is almost non-existent for mere mortals like me!! So, i decided to train myself in Leadership ...

I was working on a driver suspend/resume issue this week. The driver was originally developed without support for the Power Manager, but really it would work better if it could respond to requests from the Power Manger to change power states. No problem, I just went to Windows CE: Stream Interface Driver Power Management and cut and pasted some code and in no time had the driver ready to work with the Power Manger. The next step was to advertise to the Power Manager that the driver wanted to be managed. ...

I’m trying to be a better developer, so I try to make sure I follow best practices as much as I can. At times when I’m just creating simple methods though, every now and then I get somewhat hung up as to what do I use as types for my input parameters and return values. You see, it is something that is so basic, we create methods all the time, but most of the time, we don’t pay much attention to it since we’d just like to continue on with the task at hand. So I’m writing this to remind myself that ...

This weekend i was engaged with a rather uninteresting conversation with my wife. My wife is computer savvy but still is catching up on new technologies. Below is a brief snippet. I am hopeful that this will give you some idea on SAAS. Me: ok... Wife: What? you said something? me: Nothing. I was just talking aloud... its about SAAS. Wife: SAAS??? (for the less informed.. SAAS means mother-in-law in hindi !!!). Are you watching those hindi serials lately? me: Well, SAAS is a Acronym for Software As ...

[Amazingly – I actually got this podcast done before the MSDN Flash newsletter it accompanies :-) Despite my hoster trying very hard to turn my hair grey to get this posted! Grrrrrr. ] [Apologies in advance if you have problems downloading it. I am working right now on getting this series of podcasts up on http://channel9.msdn.com/ to give a much more reliable download provider. If you do have issues you can grab it from my Skydrive] This podcast is an interview with Tom Quinn in which we start off ...

Well, for a long time I have been a big fan of open source software, and although I'm not specifically a .NET developer, it's my main focus, as everything I do work related is .NET. I've known about The Mono Project for a while, and I typically run Ubuntu as my OS of choice, with XP running in a VM for when I really need it. Well, I haven't booted up Ubuntu for a while, having been really busy doing work stuff, so today, I decided that it was time to take Ubuntu's Latest version, Jaunty Jackalope ...

Lately I played around a bit with Aspect Oriented Programming, especially with PostSharp. I wanted to see how I could use it to reduce the amount of infrastructural code that clutters a common class like this: public class Person : INotifyPropertyChanged { private string firstName; private string lastName; private int age; public string LastName { get { return this.lastName; } set { // check the argument value if (value == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("valu... } if (value == "") { throw ...

Well, here we are again. Last time, we talked about project structure and came up with the one we’ll use for this series. Next we’ll talk tools. We’ll talk tools like Tim Taylor talks tools: with lots of grunts for my favorites and only a little explanation about what the tools do.) This is mostly because there is LOTS of material on the interwebs about all of these tools. I tend to favor the tools that are the most widely used for two main reasons: they have been battle tested by the largest crowd ...

In my experience with SSRS, I have noticed that there are two types of report developers: 1) SQL Developer that naturally flowed into SSRS, uses Stored Procedures for database development and has a very solid background for development. 2) Developers from other categories that somehow fell into SSRS. I come from the second school but I have an endless desire for learning about technology and have been fortunate enough to work with some really intelligent developers. Which brings me to one of the ...

This is a part of EXT JS Tutorial In this article I will cover information about creating, submitting and validating a forms with Ext JS library. Submitting form to the server will be based on ASP.NET MVC page, so create a new MVC project in Visual Studio and add a EXT JS library into it. How to do it I have written here. So let’s create our first form. How to create a simple form – first example. var form = new Ext.form.FormPanel({ //(1) renderTo: Ext.getBody(), //(2) url: 'Home/SubmitForm', frame: ...

I’ve talked to people recently who asked me for Silverlight resources. I thought I’d post what I relayed to them so its available to anyone else looking. Website While it might go without saying, http://silverlight.net is a great resource for tutorials, samples, and forums. Books I did some book reviews that you can read at the links below. I recommend these three books to everyone as a core Silverlight library: Pro Silverlight 2 in C# 2008 and Data-Driven Services in Silverlight 2 Reviews Foundation ...

Well, hey there you poor unsuspecting folks out there?! That's right. I made a blog ( I know what your thinking.. and yes they do let just anybody get one now adays...). I'm now a completely one of a .. million developers out there who have blogs! Yay Me! On a more serious note, I'm going to answer a few questions: Why Did I Create a Blog? Why not? And also, cause I figured it's a good way to force people to hear my opinions on stuff <insert evil laugh here>. I think it's also a good way to ...

I had looked up the LoadControl(“”) method earlier today, and came upon a short website entry that quickly discussed how to load a web user control (.ascx) dynamically onto a page. The link is: http://www.codeproject.com/... It mentioned inside that a CMS (content management system) could be built using this method + a database table to track these controls. It got me intrigued, so I decided to pursue it. It’s pretty simple, and actually adds a lot of cool functionality ...

Almost every software project comes with a database. Sometimes it will be developed from scratch and in parallel with the actual domain model for a new (aka. 'greenfield') project, sometimes it will be a pre-existent datastore provided by the customer or coming from an already running software that has to be extended (then we can call it a 'brownfield' project). In either case, you will likely end up with a bunch of database scripts that need to be executed as part of your installation process. I ...

If you spend some time using Fluent NHibernate, you’ll want to use its neat style of mapping for all data access, even when you’re working against traditional DALs. I’ve put a sample up on MSDN Code Gallery for this scenario, using a fluent style of mapping between domain objects and data readers populated by stored procedure calls. The interface is very similar to FNH, with a mapping class used for each domain entity – this is a simple mapping class: public class PostCodeMap : DataReaderMap<PostCode> ...

Here is a Discussion I started in my group "Gray Matters!" on LinkedIn. Doesn't experience count for anything these days? I have over 20 years experience in what used to be called "DP" and have a Associate degree in same. Worked on large WAN/Cisco routers for over 2 years and got pretty good at it but, do not have CCNA for cisco routers. BUT, still after almost one year of being out of work, no job offers are coming my way. It seems having 20+ years of experienc, means your too old, no CCNA means ...

This is a recipe that I carefully planned and designed after checking the contents of my fridge after a three weeks holiday in California. I found some salmon at the local supermarket and I had to decide how to cook it. Olives and leeks seems the only things still edible inside my fridge. The result tasted quite good, but my perception could have been impacted by the jet-lag... so handle this recipe carefully! Ingredients: - salmon (one large filet serves two people) - leeks (200 g) - olive oil (three ...

ClickOnce is a fascinating technology which you get right out of your Visual Studio IDE. For those unfamiliar with ClickOnce, it’s basically a deployment technology which allows developers to publish their windows-based application to a webserver or network share. Any updates to the application can easily be deployed to the client. You can read more here. I’ve been using the technology with almost all my project deployment. This time around I had to change my strategy a bit. Basically our network ...

Yippee, I will be speaking at the upcoming XP days in Mechelen. This is a first for me, and I'm really excited about this. Pascal Mestdach and myself have submitted a session on Agile Acceptance testing with FitNesse. It just got approved ...

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post titled “Geocoding pictures automatically with Nokia E71 and gpicsync” which was explaining how to use the built-in GPS in your mobile phone (in my case a Nokia E71) and a utility program called gpisync to enter geographical tags into your pictures. This is useful because using a program supporting this feature (such as Flickr for example), you can then see all your pictures on a map, and remember where you took the pictures. Read the rest of this entry » ...

This past weekend was pretty awesome; the second annual St. Louis Day of .NET conference went underway. 2 DAYS! Can you believe it? It is 2 DAYS of (almost) all-you-can-eat technical sessions; and all for a minuscule $100 (or $125 for those late registrations). First off, some disclaimer: my comment on STLDODN ‘09 will be biased. Why? Because I participated in it and I’m rather involved in it, so of course I can’t quite badmouth it :). Organizers for the St. Louis Day of .NET 2009 are: Kevin Grossnicklaus, ...

In a previous post, I showed how to submit an AJAX form in MVC with the jQuery Thickbox and the built-in MVC AJAX helpers. If you read that post first, it will show the complete context for how to simply submit an AJAX form that is being rendered inside a jQuery Thickbox with built-in MVC AJAX helpers. But what if you want to stick to a pure jQuery solution? That is also simple enough to do. Instead of using the Ajax.BeginForm() method, you can use the jQuery Form Plugin. The code is almost identical ...

OK. I am not a designer. However, a few years ago I was forced to get good at CSS and have gotten to the point that I feel confident I could create almost ANY look and feel using CSS and table-less design. There are some things that I do regularly to help me out. 1. Start at the top. Start with your master page and style that up really good. That will be your base. 2. Start with * { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif; Margin: 0px; Padding: 0px; font-size: 1.0em; } It is at the top of almost ...

Saas vs. S+S Saas is an architectural paradigm where a solution architecture can benefit from the economies of scale of the data and behavior of that architecture being built and hosted in the cloud by a third party in a multitenant fashion. Software + Services is an architectural paradigm where a solution architecture can achieve some of the same economies of scale as Saas while simultaneously benefiting from the synergies and efficiencies of the data and behavior of that architecture being partly ...

What is Sharepoint? SharePoint is Microsoft's product in the Enterprise Portal, Content Management and Colloboration space. SharePoint is actually 2 products. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) - This is what is bundled into Windows Server 2003 and later versions and includes the set of standard site templates for building web sites in SharePoint. In addition WSS includes version control, alerts, RSS feeds ans task notifications. WSS is bundled into Windows Server 2003 and greater and I believe that ...

I created this blog to help me keep track of (and pass on) things I learn while delving into the realms of Silverlight, WPF, C#, Expression (Blend, Web, etc). Hopefully someone may find this as useful as I will.

Since the beginning of July, I've been working on a java project. The language is very close to C#, although it has some minor irritating differences, like the lack good generic support, extension methods and closures. The big difference however is not in the language, the tools, the libraries or the utilities. One of the big differences I've seen is the community. I've been on many projects that have worked exclusively with Microsoft tools, libraries and (god forbid) examples. When the subject is ...

Sorry. I was going to finish this up last night, but, I spilled a big cup of water on my keyboard and mouse. The keyboard was ok but, the mouse. Well I was able to get it track right and left but, not up and down. Had to shut the PC down for the night. Got a new mouse today. Now where was I, oh ya. The night of the 19th, went to the hospital and almost got a speeding ticket. Told the officer about my daughter and he let me go. Thank the Lord!. Well we got to hospital and had to wait as the display ...

I try to spend a little time every day brushing up on my developer skills. Some days I have more success than others. I might attempt to brush up on my skills by reading a tech book (currently working through "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael C. Feathers, I'm loving that book!), practicing some new language features (I'm still wrapping my head around lambda expressions and LINQ) or just browsing tech blogs and listening to tech podcasts. I do this partly because our industry changes ...

Yes I’m a language geek and yes the awesome Eric Lippert is my idol when it comes to anything C# and the CLR, I’ve been following his blog for a long time and recently Eric wrote an awesome series on the how and why of Iterator Blocks. The entire series is very well worth a read, but then again I’d read almost anything Eric writes from why the sky is blue to why the Falkirk Wheel has horns. I had posed a question on this post about why there are no anonymous iterators in C#. Eric provided a very ...

In an effort to continually improve as a developer, one of the things I do is read lots of books. Recently I read Rails for .NET Developers by Jeff Cohen and Brian Eng. Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to any ASP.NET developer that wants to learn more about Rails or wants to better understand the concepts behind MVC. Given that ASP.NET MVC was heavily influenced by Ruby on Rails, I wanted to learn more about Rails so that I could have a better understanding of how MVC evolved the way ...

Originally Posted Here: http://www.thegrubbsian.com... I’m almost positive someone has come up with this pattern before, but it was a big help on a recent project so I thought I’d share it. The basic goal of the pattern is to make the setup and teardown work of test classes reusable. We found this to cause particular pain for integration tests written against a database where multiple dependent records needed to be created before the actual test could be performed. ...

During the last days and weeks, there's an increasingly heated debate about the performance of NHibernate vs. some other commercial and noncommercial ORMs. This debate was triggered by the launch of a new website called ORMBattle.NET, which is allegedly "devoted to direct ORM comparison" (and hosted by a commercial competitor of NH...). The comparisons are largely based on batch processing tests like this one: protected override void InsertTest(int count) { using (var transaction = session.BeginTransaction()) ...

In large projects you may have have a big number of enumerations in your domain code that have all to be kept in sync with some corresponding database stuff. Ensuring this correspondence is boring, repetitive and error-prone. Because it is such a tedious task, chances are that you don't check this at all, opening the door for serious runtime failures - especially when the project is nearing the deadline and things generally tend to become a bit more chaotic. I love enums. I use them wherever possible. ...

In an earlier post I mentioned that I was making some health related dietary changes. Well, I'm coming up on the end of my 8th week as a *mostly* vegetarian... (by *mostly, I mean that I have been eating some seafood, but no beef, pork, chicken or turkey) ...and it's been going pretty well. I've had the occasional craving for a burger or whatever, usually when at a cookout, but nothing I couldn't handle. So, on the plus side... I've lost some weight as part of this, about 9 pounds so far. I also ...

I am currently on a project that consists of an integration between a web application and SharePoint. Both applications live in their own servers and so it was necessary to use web services. I have come to many weird glitches and many unresolved issues at this time, I will make an effort to document as much as possible to save people time when working with WCF, SharePoint Web Services, and Visual Studio 2008.0 The first issue I'm going to write about is fairly easy to identify but it was frustrating ...

Those of you who know me a bit better know that I like photography and that I have no fear in calling myself an amateur photographer. Perhaps I should restrain myself from using the word “photographer” associated with me, but I can’t help it, not because of the quality of my photos (sometimes doubtful, but hey, sometimes I manage to get decent ones, like the ones I’m adding to this article just for showing off purposes :D) but because I would love to actually be a photographer, so I try. When I’m ...

I love the talks from TED and it so happens that lately I am in urge to watch (almost) all the episodes on the website whenever I can get the time! So, be it a 20 minute ride home from office or just another boring wait for someone, I WANT to watch TED! Alright, that’s exaggeration! To download the episode, I can either subscribe to the channel on iTunes and make 300+ clicks to download each episode or else, I can do this: Open up iTunes and connect to the Store. Search for “tedtalks” and select ...

The repeated Twitter hacking exposes the complex and serious security issues on the web. "The repeated Twitter hacking exposes the complex and serious security issue on the web. Unfortunately for Twitter (Google Apps, Facebook, and others), the problems have unfolded in a public arena, forcing them respond quickly to calm users and resulting in a short term solution (that clearly has not been working!). What is unknown to many internet users is that the problem doesn't end with Twitter's band aid ...

I know it is not little time .. 2yrs since from my last post. I was really stuck with my work and almost lost interest in everything other than coding. Just realized that my blog is still alive and I am not using it. I will try to update it from now onwards in a daily basis. So what I was really doing in these 2yrs .. below are they, At least writing code for 18hrs daily, yes, mostly in .NET Happen to read lots and lots of books, yes, DDD is one of them .. you know I am now enlightened At least went ...

For those of you looking for the slides for my presentation at devLink here is the link: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069... Here is the code samples: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069... So most of you guys know I’m more of an alternative/rock type person. I don’t enjoy country music much. It’s just not my thing that I will go and seek out. I don’t fully hate most of it. In fact Johnny Cash is a huge ...

I wanted to use Ninject 1.0 but I discovered that it didn’t support named binding, and didn’t know how to resolve multiple bindings to an array. Luckily I found the Ninject 2 post it’s way better than the previous version, and the changes were almost a no brainer. Hy, this continues the series of posts on IoC Containers in .NET. We are using these continers on a simple console application that autocompletes it’s functions. I’m mostly displaying the configuration part of the IoC, an overview of this ...

A colleague recently got a project where they’d like to make sure the app he’s working on can still work even when some DLL / assemblies are not there. These ‘extra’ assemblies are actually assemblies from another app, which can be used to have these 2 application communicate with each other, so there are a small number of entry points where calls are being made to these other assemblies. Also, in most cases, it’s a simple method call, not actually embedding class objects defined in the other assembly ...

In my previous post, I was working with SMTP, HTML mail templates, and String.Format to easily create HTML emails with dynamic content. We're now going to crank up the awesome a bit, and use reflection and embedded files to make this even better. The first part is easy. To embed a file into your assembly, simply go to the object's properties, and change the Build Action to Embedded Resource. We can now access this resource programatically with the following code snippet: public Stream GetEmbeddedFile(string ...

If you follow me on Twitter, read my blog, or have me on Live Messenger, you know that over the last few months I’ve had bouts of reflection, thoughtfulness, and philosophical rambling. Many of you have pinged me asking if everything was ok and I wanted to thank everybody who voiced concern, whether it was a tweet, an im conversation, an email, or breakfast in a Vancouver restaurant that I’m pretty sure was a front for a secret police command center. I couldn’t share with you what was on my heart ...

You’ve probably heard about the St. Louis Day of .NET – which is actually TWO days this year. Again we’ve had a huge response for speakers and the list of sessions is pretty balanced. I’m only officially on the agenda for one session entitled “The Search for Work-Life Balance” which I’m co-presenting with my friend Robert Fischer. There’s still time for you to register for this event and get two great days for one low price. Come to this session – leave your stress at the door, relax ...

At the company where I work, we sometimes have to dynamically build URLs - for example, when a user requests a medical claim PDF, these are generated on the fly and a webservice returns a URL to navigate to. In our production systems, these are always HTTPS - but in Development, these may be HTTP if an SSL cert is not present. To work around this, we can dynamically determine if the current page is secure, and adjust our dynamically generated link accordingly, as illustrated below: string pdfUrl= ...

One thing for sure there hasn’t been a dull moment in technology for a while. The ever increasing pace of change can make it almost as challenging as picking stocks to know which technology to choose. HTML is one of the interesting technologies because it has been the foundation of the web evolution. Without going back on a history trip, lets just agree its been around for a while. Last updated with the HTML 4.01 specification back in 1999, and with a new HTML 5 specification in the works. Recently, ...

It's been years now that unit testing frameworks and tools have grabbed our attention, made their way into our favorite IDE and sparked yet another wave of seemingly endless "my framework is better than yours" wars. And then there are the principal wars of whether TDD is better than Test After Development. And most excitingly the automated testing tools etc. Oh, and let's not forget mocks! So we have all the tools we need – right? Well, kind of, no. I recently attended a talk by Llewellyn Falco and ...

More Adventures in MVVM It has been a while since I have posted. With CodeStock, GiveCamp, Vacation, overtime at work and my other speaking gigs, I have been very busy. But things are calming down. I have several posts I’d like to get out, but for the time being, I thought I would post my conversation with David Giard about the MVVM pattern: ...